Reviews You’ll Never Use: The Battle Wizard

Greetings once again, my fellow luxuriants of the ludicrous, to another edition of Reviews You’ll Never Use. This week, let’s dip our toes into another great and underappreciated genre of film, Hong Kong wuxia (kung fu) films of the 70s & 80s. Today we’ll be taking a look at 天龍八部, or as you round-eyed devils have dubbed it, The Battle Wizard.

Magic thigh-bone gun of ultimate devastation!

I must profess to having a soft place in my heart for old trashy kung fu movies. Those of you my age or a bit older probably remember these as being staples on late-night cable, when they were just trying to fill air space. The silly dubbing, ham-fisted acting, convoluted story lines, and most importantly, the high-flying martial arts action are ambrosia for the aficionado of trash cinema.

And brother, The Battle Wizard delivers on all these fronts. It’s a Shaw Bros. production, which may not mean anything to you, until I tell you that if you ever saw a fucked up cheesy Technicolor kung fu movie on tv at 2 a.m., it was probably from this production company. This particular film is based on a serialized novel whose title variously translates as Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils or Eight Books of the Heavenly Dragon. The novel deals in archetypes based on Buddhist cosmology, so it’s all a bit complicated to explain in a blog post.

Pew pew!

The film opens with a guy getting caught in bed with his mistress, by her husband. Rookie mistake. Of course they immediately fight, but it turns out the philanderer has mastered the ancient martial art technique of shooting lasers out of your finger. He shoots the husband in the knees, and then as he tries to flee, injured, he gets shot again by the finger laser, which results in both of his legs falling off below the knee. Somehow the husband disappears over the roof, running away on his stubs. Back inside, the philanderer’s wife reveals to his side-piece that he’s actually a prince and could never marry gutter trash like her. Take THAT, bitch!

Reptile laughing uproariously. Seriously, if you watch these movies, the bad guys are *constantly* laughing their assess off for no reason. It’s really weird.

Twenty years later, we cut to an underground cave. The cuckold has built extendable iron bird-legs for himself that can destroy rocks, because of course he has. He’s hanging out with a half-human reptile-man of some sort, whose provenance is never explained. Through the magic of exposition, we learn that Prince Philanderer is now king, and has a boy. Killing the son should be just the revenge Iron Bird Legs is looking for, so he dispatches Reptile to the surface world to enact his revenge labor for him.

On the other side of the street, Gutter Trash’s daughter by Prince Philanderer is all grown up, and has mastered the ancient martial arts technique of firing lasers out of the end of an oversized novelty thigh bone. Her mother sends her out into the world to enact her revenge labor, on Prince Philanderer’s wife. She also tells Bone Shooter to always veil her face, because all men are worthless scum. See, SJWs aren’t new, they even existed in China 1,000 years ago.

MEANWHILE, AT THE HALL OF JUSTICE, sonny-boy is moping about because his old man, now King Philanderer, is trying to make him study kung fu. All the boy wants to do is read old Chinese sages and be a scholar-philosopher. After fighting with his parents over it (who claim that no one can govern unless they can also kick ass), he sullenly runs away to prove that you don’t have to be Chuck Norris to make it in the world.

Ambush by Iron Bird Legs, who it turns out 2/3 of the way through the film can also breath fire!

Here’s where shit really starts to get weird. Deep breath: he meets a woman who can mind-control snakes and kicks his ass because she knows kung fu. They’re captured by bandits, but Snake Woman uses her powers to help Pacifist Son escape. She sends him to find a particular woman that can rescue her. Pacifist Son asks several wanderers in the forest, and eventually learns that the chick is a hated witch. Heart in throat he approaches her hideout to beg for help for Snake Woman. Turns out, the witch is Bone Shooter. What a twist! So Bone Shooter shows up, kills the bandits, frees Snake Woman (who promptly fucks right off until near the end of the film), and has to allow Pacifist Son to see her face because he sucked poison out of her wound sustained during the fight with the bandits. They’re then ambushed by Reptile, but survive because it turns out a giant red snake lives in the river and because it ate nothing but ginseng and deer antlers it’s whole life, it somehow grants magic super martial arts powers to anybody who drinks it’s blood (I swear that is the exact explanation given in the film). So in desperation Pacifist Son bites the snake and drinks it’s blood, sending Reptile scurrying back to tell Iron Bird Legs about this intriguing development. Pacifist Son and Bone Shooter go back to the palace because they want to get married, but find out they’re half-siblings through King Philanderer. Iron Bird Legs springs an ambush and captures Pacifist Son and Bone Shooter, throwing them into a pit (after an awkwardly weird scene of Reptile stripping and fondling the woman) where they have to fight a super-strong man in a cheap gorilla costume. Pacifist Son uses his snake invincibility to eat a magic poisonous frog that Snake Woman had given him earlier; this somehow makes him go Super Saiyan, and he defeats the magic carnivorous gorilla and escapes from the pit. There’s a final show-down with Bone Shooter, Snake Woman, Reptile, Pacifist Son, and Iron Bird Legs, where everybody shoots a shit-ton of lasers out of their hands at each other. Eventually the good guys kill all the bad guys, the end.

Seriously, lasers everywhere.

This is an amusing diversion for a variety of reasons. The effects are, of course, garish and silly by today’s standards, but I profess a certain fondness for the earnestness of the efforts of people burdened by a lack of both money, and skill. The plot is simply marvelous. Everyone trying to get revenge on everyone else, magical beings all over the place, the most crowded fucking forest I’ve ever seen in my life. The most interesting aspect to me, though, is the explicit turning of the usual trope of the weakling Chinese valuing faggoty scholarship in the classics over the vigorous manly martial valor that we value in the West. In this movie, the protagonist explicitly tries to be the very model of a perfect Confucian ruler, and is ridiculed for it, and basically gives up on it like 15 minutes into the film when he first agrees to let Snake Woman try and teach him kung fu.

Carnivorous gorilla of doom. I hope Iron Bird Legs takes revenge on a lot of people, because that seems to be the only way the ape gets fed.

If you’re already partial to this kind of film, you’ll love it. It’s got everything you could ever want from a 1970s low-budget Hong Kong import, including a hilarious scene of a horse falling to it’s death over a cliff. If you don’t already like this kind of film, it has nothing for you that would make you change your mind. I rate this film 3.5 Glowing Hands out of 7. Props to anybody who can name the movie this image is from without looking it up.

I still give them a dozen views a week or so and comment on Brickbats, mostly to give Oliver shit for being so lazy that he can’t even muster up enough effort to post the simplest article of the day.

It’s funny how Mary/DanO has become the default white knight of the staff. I wasn’t around for those days but based on the stories I’ve heard that completely threw me for a loop.

Hyperion
on May 18, 2017 at 7:39 pm

They have some great articles between the TDS. That’s why I still visit at least a couple times a week. I thought that DanO is shreek’s new handle, after he famously became the first and only person to ever get Catassed at Glibs.

Rhywun
on May 18, 2017 at 7:46 pm

I’m there pretty much all day because Glibs is blocked at work.

It’s… interesting.

Trigger Hippie
on May 18, 2017 at 7:55 pm

The story I heard was DanO made an appearance right after Shika retweeted one of Mary’s posts and/or the exodus. Chip your pets is Tulpa, and shreek was so fucking irritating that he got his addictionmyth and dajjal socks banned, sulked for a bit, and is back as buttblug.

When did this catass occur? Have a link?

Playa Manhattan
on May 18, 2017 at 10:02 pm

DanO/Kizone/Mary signed up here under the handle Cuffy Migs.

It was unable to behave itself, so we banned it.

Playa Manhattan
on May 18, 2017 at 10:04 pm

Oh, and Buttplug was banned immediately after he registered.

westernsloper
on May 18, 2017 at 7:25 pm

Just because you only fap to olden time black and white movies doesn’t give you the right to look down on us Ted.

Yeah, the part I miss most is that as soon as I clicked to open it and started scrolling, my wife would walk by and go ‘OMG! Her ass is big! You really love big asses… don’t you think that’s too big? My ass isn’t that big!’.

WTF? Are you telling me they’ve taken time out enough from TDS to talk about Chelsea?

I think there needs to be a poll. Who’s the mostest coolest identify as a woman now so I can maybe get out of prison, is it Chelsea or Caitlyn? Must be something about C names that get you more empathy.

Well, I mean I guess we have to weigh the evidence. ‘Chelsea’ is about to spend a shitload of time in a military prison as a deserter and traitor, and ‘Caitlyn’ is about to get convicted of killing someone in a car crash.

Study A. Write
Works at San fransisco golf club
“see noam chimsky, an awesome linguist. also, congress is giving thought to suspending president trump for the many slurs he used prior to and after becoming the president. and, finally, major league baseball is giving thought to suspending ty cobb, posthumanously, for his many slurs during and after games.
i really like the idea of” todays society”, as compared to past societies, these people have not been near a university campus, the local tavern, the high school, a fast food restaurant and heard the thoughts of the people who frequent this environment. to suggest todays society is superior to another time is extremely naive and borderline social psychotic. people want to honestly believe the sociey has changed from 1200 a,d,, it has not. just ask the slave drivers.”

Yeah, it’s bullshit but look at the kids today who have been so pampered and have never learned how to handle any sort of conflict resolution on their own. That’s why they demand safe spaces and speech policing. They’re going to be very unhappy adults. Call the guy an asshole and be done with it.

– when they try to give the impression a guy can jump huge distances by showing then hop, cutting to them basically ‘falling through space’, creating the impression they’re flying through the air, then cutting to them hopping again, as though they just landed after a huge leap.

It was the sort of “fuck it – no one would believe it anyway, so let’s just pretend and the viewers will use their imagination”-sort of thing they routinely did before ‘wire-work’ came in and provided their exact vision of what it was *supposed* to look like.

Wire-work ‘realism’ ruined kung-fu movies for me. I mean, i really liked the Ip-Man style, high-budget, super-technical choreographed stuff…. but the average jet-li movie just bored me. I really liked the ghetto movies because they felt more like ‘comic books’, and required some active suspension of disbelief.

but i hated the fight-sequences and the flying through the trees shit. I also didn’t like…. what was that movie that won lots of awards and had all those scenes with like 100million arrows flying at people? that one. Basically all the new, arty, huge-budget kung-fu movies leave me cold.

Yes! exactly. The ‘second or third’ kicks that make no logical sense. the first would have expended all the force from the flying leap, but somehow they manage to generate new kinetic energy out of nothing while suspended in midair. Classic.

I think in some of the earlier thread people recommended that if you’re into auto-erotic asphyxiation, you should always have a suicide note around, just in case. “I can’t live in this world anymore. P.S. I used my belt to hang myself, that’s why my pants were around my ankles.” That note would solve a lot of problems.

“The Last Mogul” would also make money, because that is what his films did (he said movies that made money were his favourite kind). And then the proceeds would go to charity, just as Sir Run Run gave millions to good causes, increasingly in mainland China.

Speaking of Blaxploitation. Have you seen Black Dynamite? One of my favorites.

“Let me tell you something, sucka. I am blacker than black, blacker than the ace of spades, and when the revolution comes, I’ll be on the front lines, but until then. You need to Shut the Fuck Up, ’cause grown folks is talkin’.

It resonates with something that i was thinking of and may have commented about yesterday = i think this idea that the Dem-media has been generating so much froth over – that Trump is ‘impeachable’ in any real sense – is actually a terrible idea for their own team.

I think they recognize this, and that stories like the NYT thing above are some belated effort to tell their snooterati-twitter-journo circles that “remember, we don’t actually have the votes in congress even if there *were* some dirt”.

But i think that important fact is simply not going to get heard below the headlines.

I mean even The Other Site had 3 or 4 stories with “impeachment” in the headline – tho 2 were attempts to downplay its significance…. the message people get regardless of the content is that Impeachment is actually a real possibility. And as the NYT story notes = it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle that politicians want to exploit – eg.

Such demands, and the deluge of stories detailing what progressives believe amounts to high crimes and misdemeanors, are making it increasingly difficult for lawmakers to maintain a judicious posture. … [insert recent lionization of Maxine Waters] …. Liberals are planning a series of nationwide protests on July 2 known as “Impeachment Marches” to increase the pressure….. J.B. Pritzker, a prominent Democratic donor and businessman who is running for governor of Illinois, publicly demanded that the House initiate proceedings against Mr. Trump. He said other investigative options were too slow.

I think what may actually happen is that this whole special-prosecutor thing is going to simply let all the gas out of their Whippet-like-high, and when they have their comedown to reality, they’re going to be *pissed*

the article basically says the same thing. It reminds me of the way the GOP whipped the public into a frenzy over immigration in the late part of the Bush second term… and which voters wanted action on. Failure to deliver on that helped create the Tea Party, and eventually Trump. I don’t know if it will hurt them in the mid-terms, but i do think if it comes around to 2020 and their ‘impeachment’ shit has repeatedly gone nowhere, they will suffer *badly*

I don’t know if it will hurt them in the mid-terms, but i do think if it comes around to 2020 and their ‘impeachment’ shit has repeatedly gone nowhere, they will suffer *badly*

The main way it will hurt the Democrats in the mid-terms is it will drive up turn up of actual Trump supporters and people who are pissed about the “everything Trump does is reason to impeach him” crowd. If they keep it up and don’t get anywhere, then their base won’t turn out in 2020 and Trump and anti-anti-Trumpers will deliver the Democrats a huge beat down.

Meh. Traditionally, mid term races favor the opposition. And the Communist base is really, really fired up. I would be surprised if the Dems retake the house, but they will likely pick up a half dozen seats.
I suspect that they lose one Senator.

I also think it is accelerating things that terrify the democrats – the fragmentation between rank-and-file Prog voters and the ‘democrat establishment’
(the nexxus between the Media, ActBlue, SEIU, AFSCME, various other ‘money’ orgs)

e.g.

The loudest calls for impeachment on Wednesday came from candidates running on the left in Democratic primary elections: In Virginia and New Jersey, two states holding off-year elections for governor this fall, insurgent primary candidates insisted that Congress must begin a process that could end with Mr. Trump’s removal

There are many leftier-than normal politicians who see opportunity for themselves by screaming at the establishment folks and saying, “You didn’t deliver!!”. Most may not have any impact in the short term… but i think if more and more extreme-lefty pols get into office… the long-term effect on the DNC would be far worse, because it would basically make any sort of ‘compromise candidate’ for president impossible. They would have to be “as lefty as Bernie” if not ‘better’.

i just think its not going to end well for them. I can’t imagine what they will cook up if this ‘Russians’ and ‘impeachment’ shit dries up with zero results.

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The BBC programme documentary makers behind the show have already been on record as saying they “didn’t want to give these people [the English Defence League] an opportunity” by making the series, and that “there was no religious basis for this”.
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The social-justice crowd are moving toward the same point as the Charlie Hebdo killers, and for the same reason: They’re too stupid to argue. For the Islamic imperialists, debate is a largely alien concept. For the left, it’s simply too much effort. As I said here many years ago, the great appeal of multiculturalism is that it absolves you from having to know anything about other cultures: If they’re all equally valid, what’s the point? Slap on the CO-EXIST bumper sticker and off you tootle. No need to worry whether the “C” might have a bit of a problem with some of the other letters, and that indeed, if not for the “C”, you wouldn’t need a bumper-sticker admonition to CO-EXIST in the first place. But, after two generations of social engineering, of the substitution of attitudes for education, it would require too much effort to equip yourself to argue against the difficult questions a man such as Robert Spencer raises. It’s literally easier to kill him.
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I´m incredibly sad that you were poisoned with what was supposedly metamphetamine or related amphetaminoid. That shows how insane and unhealthy that person (who did this to you). I hope he will be found soon and held responsible for his actions.
With that being said, how do you know if that person is a leftist? Couldn’t he be a bank-loving libertarian? Do you have any conclusive evidence that this criminal was a leftist?

With regards,

Jóhann
Reykjavik, Iceland
Reply

Robert Spencer says

May 18, 2017 at 8:23 am

Generally it is Leftists who oppose my work. I can’t imagine what a “bank-loving libertarian” would find objectionable in it, but I confess I have never met such an animal.

Go fuck yourself, Jóhann. I hope you die from an overdose of methamphetamines.

1. The socialism subreddit started a Venezuela megathread, in which they blame everybody but the Venezuelan government and socialism for Venezuela’s problems. They also pre-emptively banned everyone from /r/vzla, which is more or less a sub for Venezuelan ex-pats (let’s say that Maduro is not exactly popular there).

2. Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles, already banned from running for public office for 15 years, was supposed to meet with the UN today, until his passport was seized and won’t be given back until at least 2020. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-39970703

Look, I’m a socialist, i frequent r/Socialism alot. And its basicly universally agreed on, that shit needs to be fixed in Venezuela. Chavestas policies weren’t properally implemented and now we have a crisis. What we dont want is the opposition party taking over because they have refused peace talks, have killed dozens of officers and civilians, wirh machetes and razor wire, and black market guns, and targeted entire apartment blocs full of civilians. And we don’t want US intervention, And have Venezuela come out like Argentina with a far right dicatorship that had death sqauds killing socialists (which is still the largest party in Venezuela). The opposition has always hated the government, and was backed by an attempted coup by the U.S. government in 2002. After every election that had the opposition lost, their leaders encouraged thier supporters to Riot. And have convinced a large portion of employers to go on “Strike” and not buy any products from anyone, causing the mass shortages.

No elections have been called off in Venezuela, they are schedule in 2018, and the constitution forbids them having early elections. The senate was reestablished days after it was removed from power, and they plan to have a constitutional assembly where all citizens are invited to give input to a new constitution to get rid of the corruption on Both sides of the isle, the main reason why the senate was suspended in the first place as it was found many senators on both sides ran fraudulent campaigns.

Plus the fact that Venezuela is constantly miss branded as “Socialist”

let me explain before u right me off.

Socialism focuses on the Democratic control by the workers of the means of production, the emphasize being BY THE WORKERS. Venezuela nationalized it’s oil industry, replacing employers with Goverment officials. Meaning the GOVERNMENT controls the means of production.

Venezuela is hardly the first capitalist system to have nationalized industies, Norway has them in the form of Railway and Steel industries, same in 1970s england, and industries in Germany, France and Italy, and many others are operated by the government. The fact that Venezuela has multiple multi biillion dollar private corperations kinda points to the fact it is Capitalist.

Its a Social Democracy like Norway, mixing socialist policies and the capitalist system, to protect workers rights. Norway does this as well.

I just hope u understand their is more than one dynamic of “Good vs evil” both sides are in a complex political battle, that neither socialist or capitalists can completely comprehend until its all said and done. Im saying before you support the opposition or the socialists (who are mad at the president as well for over reaching his boundries) educate yourself as much as possible with an open mind. Look at both sides. Understand thier FULL motivations before going in blindly to support oneside before the other.

The way the ussr was set up after lenins death, was designed to be greedy. Stalins whole idea was “before we move to socialism, we must prefect Capitalism” they had a form of capitalism called State Capitalism where bosses are replaced with government workers. So yes, greed did kill the USSR, its the same kind of greed killing America right now. Apathy is also a result of jt, because the greedy has taken over the government and the poorer people cant hope to fight back. The differnce is private and government controlled sector industry.

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I blame Karl Marx for that, somewhat. Marx helped kill “utopian socialism” (my favorite kind of socialism). The utopian socialists used to actually dream of the kind of worlds they would create, conjuring elaborate and delightfully vivid visions of how a better and more humane world might actually operate. Some of these veered into the absurd (Charles Fourier believed the seas would turn to lemonade), but all of them encouraged people to actually think in serious detail about how human beings live now, and what it would be like if they lived differently. Marx, on the other hand, felt that this was a kind of foolishly romantic, anti-scientific waste of time. The task of the socialist was to discern the inexorable historical laws governing human social development, and then to hasten the advance of a revolution. According to Marx, it was pointless trying to spend time drawing up “recipes for the cook-shops of the future”; instead, left-wing thinkers should do as Marx believed he was doing, and confine themselves “to the mere critical analysis of actual facts.”

But analysis doesn’t actually create proposals, and it was because Marx believed that that things could sort themselves out “dialectically” that he didn’t think it was necessary to explain how communism might actually function day-to-day. Ironically, given Marx’s dictum that philosophers should attempt to change the world rather than merely interpreting it, Marx and his followers spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out social theories that would properly interpret the world, and precious little time trying to figure out what changes might actually improve people’s lives versus which changes might lead to disaster. (Call me crazy, but I believe this tendency to shun the actual development of policy might have been one reason why nearly every single government that has ever called itself Marxist has very quickly turned into a horror show.)
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As a visionary, Fourier’s ideas seem quite fantastical and without ground in reality. Indeed, there is much in Fourier’s writing that is pure nonsense. Yes, like some of the representatives of the early French communist movement, Fourier exhibits that almost characteristic pretension of the visionary: contradictory, confused, repetitive, chaotic and, of course, long-winded. Reading Fourier after having read Marx and Engels, Fourier comes off as a confused thinker. For instance, Fourier’s passion for numbers led him to predict that the ideal world he was helping to create would last 80,000 years, 8,000 of them in an era of Perfect Harmony in which:

androgynous plants would copulate
six moons would orbit the earth
the North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean
the seas would lose their salt and become oceans of lemonade
the world would contain 37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 million mathematicians equal to Newton and 37 million dramatists equal to Molière, although “these are approximate estimates”
every woman would have four lovers or husbands simultaneously
***

Sounds like a pretty run-of-the-mill psychotic. The hospital where I used to work has 20 or 30 of those people at any given time. It may seem exotic and interesting at first but it gets very tiresome very quickly. Also worth noting: the insane are invariably completely self-absorbed, something they have in common with SJW’s and other lefties. There is a lot of cross-over between the two groups, as in the Venn diagram looks like a circle.